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Continued Cord Cutting Hits the Pay TV Business Hard
An anonymous reader writes: Cord cutting is not a new concern for the pay TV business but a recent massive sell-off in media stocks has many in the industry worried. Cable, satellite and TV companies suffered their worst-ever quarterly subscriber declines losing more than half a million accounts, sending stocks tumbling. Researchers say this may be the beginning of the end for the pay TV business. According to analysts Craig Moffett and Michael Nathanson: "A year ago, the Pay TV sector was shrinking at an annual rate of 0.1 percent. A year later, the rate at which the Pay TV sector is declining has quickened to 0.7 percent year-over-year. That may not seem like a mass exodus, but it is a big change in a short period of time. And the rate of decline is still accelerating."
How are Hulu and Netflix doing? Even better, how is HBO doing now that they've made HBO Go available without a cable subscription?
I'm currently paying for both Hulu and Netflix (and also Crunchyroll) and i'm thinking of picking up HBO Go. I have no problem paying for the content i want, it's the hassle of dealing with the cable company plus paying for a lot of crap that i don't want that's the problem.
My big gripe at the moment is SyFy. For the first time since they changed their name to something that sounds like a venereal disease they're producing content that i'm actually interested in. But i can't watch it because even though they're posting it to Hulu they're requiring that you have a cable subscription to view it. I don't know if this is stupidity on their part or some kind of legal tangle they just can't free themselves from, but i _want_ to watch their stuff and i'm willing to pay them, either directly or indirectly, but they just won't let me.
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If they spent their time keeping subscribers happier rather than cannibalizing subscribers of other types of service they wouldn't be losing so much.
The NUMBER ONE difference in cost between services comes from moving from one to another.
If my monthly bill didn't slowly creep up after a couple of years, I wouldn't be forced to move to something else. Instead of whoring out for "new bundles", just offer a lower price. 99% of the people moving service don't want to or have to because of coverage, but do because they can save $60 a month with a new "introductory" bundle somewhere else.
Also there is this strange resistance to allowing users to pick what they want to watch and pay for only that. Believe it or not, some people don't want four channels of QVC, and they'd rather pay the $8 for the weather channel (or whatever) instead of $22 for a bunch of shit along with the weather channel.
I did this for a long time. I actually ended up buying the "season passes" for shows on iTunes and "multi passes" of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. All told, i'd spend about $400 a year buying the HD versions of the shows on iTunes. The show's would be available to me the day after they aired on Cable. But I would own them, be able to watch them anytime, and they'd be commercial free. All for about half of what I was paying for cable each year.
Who'd have thought that treating your customers like scumbags and cash cows might eventually cause them to leave?
This is my surprised face.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
That's okay. I've looked at my usage and I could get away with DSL speeds or even with cellular if I absolutely had to. Plus Google Fiber will probably end up in my city within the next year or two an I'm planning on getting rid of my cable provider altogether.
Besides, if the recent FCC decision to regulate Internet providers like they regulated telephone companies to fight against the ISPs' attempts to extort fees from content providers sticks, as a common-carrier designation the cable companies might find themselves required to provide Internet access even if that's the only service the customer wants.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
We dropped Comcast and deployed Leaf antennas. We get a couple of dozen channels, including the four major networks and a number of sub-channels rented by movie and rerun networks (e.g., Cozi, Movies!, MeTV, Buzzr, Laff, Decades, Retro, Bounce, Escape, Grit, Get, etc.). If there's nothing on, or the reception is being interrupted by who-knows-what, we turn off the TV and do something else. Every month we enjoy not paying Comcast.
As someone who literally hasn't had a TV (in the traditional sense) in their house for 20 years, I'm always shocked at the sheer amount of advertising whenever I'm on business travel and the hotel internet isn't fast enough for netflix. Even if it's a show I'm intensely interested in, I'd much rather wait for it to come out on DVD or arrive on netflix than suffer through all the advertising. A bit at the top and bottom of each hour, sure, but ~5 minutes of commercials every ~5 minutes? How do "normal" people stand for that?
Given that I can only watch the stream of Cable TV for as long as I subscribe to cable, I would say that I own them much more so than the product I got from Cable TV. If I decide to stop buying new shows, I can still go back and rewatch the old ones as many times as I want. If I stop paying for cable I can't watch anything.
Sure the authentication server could go down permanently, but at this point i've already watched and rewatched most of the shows multiple times over the last 5 years i've been doing this. I've also spent half as much doing this as I would've spent on cable. And I haven't had to deal with commercials.
So far, I also don't see the sun setting on the iTunes store any time in the foreseeable future. If it did, however, I would expect to see a MUCH bigger outcry over the "purchases" people have done on iTunes disappearing. To the extent that it would actually bring the topic up to mainstream news and actually spark some debate and possible change to the laws about what is required to ensure that you can continue to enjoy your purchases in perpetuity. I would also expect people to work much more diligently about then cracking the iTunes DRM.
...too expensive. People are voting with their wallets. Time for the time honored appropriate response to a shift in the demand curve where the amount demanded at every price is less: time for price cuts.
Everybody in the industry has gotten fat: producers, actors, athletes, sports leagues, coaches, college athletic programs, on air talent, etc. (I'm mostly interested in ESPN, I almost never watch anything on HBO etc, but the same logic applies). You can't pay billions to televise a single college football conference, raise your prices to astronomical levels to cover same and expect your customers to keep shelling out.
There will be a blood bath, especially in the college sports world. The days of $5mm/year coaches, $1mm/year AD's and $750mm stadiums with lavish locker rooms, indoor training facilities, etc, are going to quickly come to an end.
The NFL will feel the pinch as well.
You've fallen into the trap. The real struggle should be corporate control of the country versus control by the people, but the corporations have convinced too many people that there's a left vs right fight going on, or a liberal versus conservative struggle. It is distracting you from the real enemy. If you think Disney or Comcast are "liberal" then you have drunk their lemonade. Corporations are not political, they are instead impersonal hive minds. They follow the winds of change without any loyalty to any political brand except for money. American has been deluded into thinking that if they're anti-abortion that they must always be anti-tax at the same time, and if they're pro-gay-rights that they must automatically be pro-union. It's stupid, there area million different political stances that any voter could have and yet we're being fooled into thinking that there are only two: us versus them.
Don't hate Disney because they have different political views than your tribe has, but hate them because they're replacing "we the people" with "we the stockholders".
We must have different cable companies.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Typically we now see 20 minutes of ads for every 40 minutes of program. So, 1/3 of the time is commercials. Since commercials suck, It's little wonder that cable TV is shrinking its customer base. You can get the same crap, with fewer channels, over the air with the same 20 minutes of commercials per hour, and plenty of digital sub-channels showing old programs. Why not cut the cord when the cord keeps getting more expensive and the quality is not any better?
I moved two months ago and learned I had an option between AT&T Uverse and Charter Digital. AT&T was 25Mbps for $50 a month with a free phone number and I didn't have to buy television services if I didn't want them. Charter was (reportedly) 600 Mbps (right...), forced you to include phone and TV, and cost well over $100 a month. Both companies wanted install fees nearly $100. Both companies report you to the copyright cartels if you torrent shit.
I went with AT&T. Why? I know from experience that a decent real-time speed necessary for acceptable HD streaming is between 3 and 6 Mbps (depends on format, encoding, etc.). So even the slower of the two was five times what I needed. I don't plan on torrenting terabytes of files, though I do want to be able to download a few favorite shows now that I don't have a cable box and a tuner. AT&T costs me half as much, even counting the $50 a year for VPN.
Also, I HATE Charter with a passion. They've been a dick of a company ever since I've patronized them, starting 25 years ago. They'll cut you off if you're late paying for service in advance -- that's right, their bill says you're paying for service in the upcoming month. But if you're a week late, they cut you off and charge to reconnect. And after multiple instances of that, they'll cut you off the day after the due date. (These experiences are decades old and three addresses ago, but true ones.) To this day, they have constant outages during business hours, are assholes on the phone, and their equipment quality is crap. Not to mention the conflicts of interest that exist between content providers and cable companies, and the accusations of bandwidth throttling (not specifically against Charter... yet).
While AT&T are no angels, they're at worst the equivalent of a lumbering corporate behemoth from the users' perspective. And I was impressed by the tech who came out to install my service. He found an unexpected problem, and I immediately thought oh no, I'm not getting internet today but the guy actually busted his ass to get the job done. (He had to run back and forth two blocks to test each end of 25 pairs of wires to find the right pair at the fiber transciever. What should have been a 30 minute job turned into a 2.5 hour one that involved a lot of sweating.) My first bill payment was three weeks late (I had to travel on business and forgot) and I didn't even hear a peep out of them. The next bill had a $5 late payment charge. And the charges are for the past month's services. And the reliability of the service has been excellent... Netflix, Hulu and Amazon all stream fantastically, with better quality than I had using Charter at my previous residence (admittedly, a sorta remote one), and always instant play. Even porn streaming sites are better. (Yea, you betcha that's one of the first thing I tried...)
TL;DR: I cut the cable, dumped the least favorite corporation I was forced to patronize, and I am SO HAPPY. The only programming I can't get are daily game shows (I'm a Jeopardy addict) and sporting events (meh... I'll go to a bar if I need to watch a game, which is seldom).
I can see the fnords!
Hmm, you haven't noticed the corrosive right in the country which despises anyone who doesn't share their opinions?
Who cares? The lack of spectator sports on Netflix is a feature, not a bug.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
I watched Jon Stewart on Plex for free. Although, I think he was also available on Hulu.
Besides - consumers today change over from watching TV at decided times to use Video on Demand like Netflix and YouTube.
In many cases they can at the same time avoid the annoying ads injected into the TV programs that are on broadcast. On the web - well, there you have adblock to clean up the crap.
We are in the middle of a media transition phase where people changes their habits to do cherry picking and only pay for what they want to see.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
"sports fee" of $6 per month, No sports channels...don't do sports on tv $72 per year ? SNIP
It has nothing to do with "liberal" or "conservative". It's that they're all family. They all share the last name, "Inc.".
Seriously, what idiot thinks corporations give a crap about liberal or conservative? If anyone was paying attention to the Republican debate, Donald Trump (of all people) broke it down for them. He gives money to everyone. He explained, on national TV, that he buys politicians as a matter of course. Left, right and center they take his money and are available when he needs something. And people still think I'm extreme when I say that this country is an oligarchy.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)